Friday, November 19, 2010

Sony has rolled out a free gold membership weekend for EQ2X. I'm not convinced that there are many players who will decide to subscribe solely because of a trial weekend, but SOE could still come out ahead if players decide to buy more races, classes, or character slots based on the trial. That said, non-subscribers can extract significant value out of this event, especially if it becomes a recurring promotion.

Non-subscribers are only charged broker tokens (which cost real money) when they attempt to ADD an item to the broker. You will not be charged for adjusting prices on existing listings (as needed to ensure you have the best prices), collecting the proceeds of your sales, or even removing items that you might have left in there for storage (which you are not necessarily required to offer for sale at any price). Now would be a great time to list all those rare harvests you've got in your limited bank space.

Items that are stashed in personal, bank, or shared bank slots that you lose access to as a result of your free Gold account expiring can be removed freely, just not put back in the forbidden slots. This is another great option for long term storage.

The restriction on expert and master quality spells only prevents you from upgrading the spell while you are a non-subscriber. Any upgrades you manage to obtain during this weekend are yours to keep (until you outlevel them anyway); if you're low level, you may be able to get one or more masters from the Research Assistant during this time.

If you were debating whether to purchase premium races and classes, this would obviously be a good time to take them for a spin. You will lose access to any such characters when the weekend ends.

HOWEVER, be warned that EQ2 has a very clunky way of handling loss of character slots; when your subscription expires, you will have access to the MOST RECENT characters you logged into. For example, if you as a silver player already have your four silver slots full and you create an additional character this weekend using the three temporary slots, you will need to make sure that the last four characters you use are the four you want to keep access to. If you mess this up, you will need to delete characters or obtain additional slots (either by resubscribing or paying a one time $10 fee per slot to add more).

Overall, it will be interesting to see whether this deal ever returns. Even as a non-subscriber, I might have considered paying SOE $15 once a year for a month of gold access to do the things I've described above. If they're going to offer a trial weekend every six months or so, that expense becomes unnecessary. As a result, one imagines that this event will only return if it actually succeeds in driving more sales after the event concludes. Whatever happens, though, there's no reason for current Bronze/Silver EQ2X players NOT to take advantage of the event while it's active.

I'm mainly working the "master abilities" end of the weekend deal. All of my permanent characters have spells or arts going at a researcher. For some of them, it's a major upgrade.

My favorite is the level 20 Shadow Knight that will soon be able to do 2500 damage with an instant cast. That's enough to get anything anywhere near his level at least down to half, if not kill his opponent outright.

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About Player Versus Developer

I'm what they call a "WoW Tourist" - WoW was my first MMO, and being able to set my own schedule is a dealbreaker. At any given time, I can be found ducking in and out of half a dozen different MMO's.

This blog details some of my own personal exploits, but it also focuses on a meta-gaming issue that I find very interesting - the decisions developers make on how to reward player activity, and the decisions players make in response to maximize their own rewards.